Should You Use rel=”nofollow” in your blogs?
That is the question, written is such a way as to make Shakespeare himself roll over in his grave.
When I first got started in blogging, the way I was taught on linking was to put the rel=”nofollow” command before every link. The reason was that this command would instruct search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page. Keeping these little critters on your web would help improve your page rank and this technique would improve your search rankings while allowing these little bots off your page would help other pages at the expense of your own blog.
Is this rel=”nofollow” thinking right or wrong?
I recently had the opportunity to listen to search engine optimization expert Keith Baxter speak about SEO techniques and asked him specifically if he used the rel=”nofollow” command on his blogs to keep the crawlers on his site. His exact response was ‘I don’t really worry about that.” Essentially, while there is a time and a place for the rel=”nofollow” command in blogs, it typically doesn’t have much of an effect on SEO.
When is the best time to use the rel=”nofollow” command in blogs?
To find the answer, I want to the Shakespeare of webmasters himself- the Google webmaster. Here are the three scenarios when they recommend using a ‘rel=”nofollow” command:
- Untrusted content: If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the
nofollowattribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time. - Paid links: A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use
nofollowon such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word “Advertisement”). More information on Google’s stance on paid links. - Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using
nofollowon these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.
In conclusion, I guess you don’t have to be selfish with linking and keep all the Google bots to your own site. However, if you don’t trust or want to vogue for the quality of a site or if you don’t want to send a Google bot to a paid site, then it looks like using the rel=”nofollow” command is a good idea. Otherwise, no need to be selfish- share the link juice with others!
Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
What is you opinion of the rel=”nofollow” command? Do you use it in your blog or not? Leave your comment below.